Stephen Pym lives in Sydney with his wife Anna and son Daniel. He has a Palaoebiology degree with honours in Wildlife Illustration and has worked for many years in natural resource management.
Stephen finds inspiration for his artwork in the plants, animals and landscapes of the bushland around Sydney. He enjoys depicting these in a realistic manner, working in acrylic, watercolour or pencil.
His ambition is for his artwork to inspire in others a love and concern for our amazing creation. He has just been shortlisted for the CBCA Crichton Award 2013 for his first picture book, Apollo the Powerful Owl.
A Brontosaur: the life story unearthed - Beverly & Jenny Halstead
As a child I was raised on a strict diet of books about dinosaurs. They provided vivid windows into a long-lost world that ensnared my imagination. Most intriguing of all, however, was that these fantastical creatures were real! I saw their giant bones in the museum. And so, like a set of fossil footprints, I was placed firmly upon a path that led to a palaeontology degree.
Chief among these books was A Brontosaur: the life story unearthed. It follows a sauropod named Ajax, from a hatchling that barley escapes becoming breakfast for flying pterosaurs, through the challenges of a hostile world, until ultimately contesting the alpha male for leadership of the herd.
I long considered the full-page illustrations as a benchmark to aspire to. Even to this day the story brings a tear to my eye.
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
This timeless tale of the little guy (literally) triumphing over the big guy (or big eye) can only be told the way it was intended - in book form.
When, at 13, I began my first foray into this daunting classic, I abandon the fellowship at ‘The Council of Elrond’, hardly one sixth of the way through the journey. In later years, however, the pull of the One Ring drew me back to Middle-earth and I have since completed the quest many times over.
Generations of writers and illustrators (myself among them) have been inspired by Tolkien’s masterpiece. And though he has a multitude of imitators, I’ve yet to see any who can match the richness of imagination and epic writing style of his seminal work.
Pemulwuy: The Rainbow Warrior - Eric Willmot
When the British first arrived in Australia, the local indigenous peoples welcomed them with open arms, considering them ‘gods’, or the spirits of their ancestors returned from the dead . . . or so I was taught in school.
Pemulwuy: The Rainbow Warrior was the first novel I read that begged to differ with the traditional accounts of the colonisation of New South Wales. It relates the story of Pemulwuy, a ‘clever man’ from one of the Sydney clans. Far from rolling over to these new ‘gods’, he gathers together a band of warriors and wages a guerrilla-style war on the invaders, bringing the fledgling colony to its knees.
The novel no doubt contains some embellishments on history, yet the man Pemulwuy and his deeds were real enough. It sparked off in me a hunger to know the truth about the founding of modern Australia, beyond the sanitized accounts I’d been fed in school.
Field Guide to the Native Plants of Sydney - Les Robinson
Since I was a toddler, I have lived, worked, and played in the bushland around Sydney. Yet my familiarity with the local plants was always limited. They were nameless strangers to me, comprising a green-grey mass. I yearned to be able to stroll along a bush track knowing the species I passed.
Field Guide to the Native Plants of Sydney by Les Robinson has been without doubt the most influential plant book I’ve come across. With its clear line drawings and simple text, it gave me the confidence and skills to identify and classify Sydney’s native plants.
The bushland is no longer simply a mass of vegetation. Due largely to this book, I am on a first name basis with most native plants in the Sydney region, and many of them I now consider old and dear friends.
The Bible
I first began to seriously read the bible in my early twenties, and it has since become the most influential book in my life. This ‘library’ of 66 books was written by some 40 different people over a period of possibly1600 years.
What is remarkable is that from such a diversity of sources, the central ‘story’ of the Bible remains consistent: The human race has abandoned God, but he desperately wants them back.
It has shaped my view of God, the world around me, and the creative process itself. My illustrations are my best efforts to reproduce and pay homage to the extraordinary work of the first and greatest Artist.
